> micro services could actually live up to the promises if you follow ALL the rules religiously.

To be fair, I think this is true of nearly everything (well, except maybe Agile). Like, yeah, a monoliths work great IF you rigorously follow software engineering best practices about isolation, coupling, concurrency, and overall project organization ... but in real life they usually turn into a tangled mess of broken abstraction boundaries and encapsulation-breaking hacks.

(that said I'd still much rather untangle and refactor a poorly organized monolith than a mush of poorly factored microservices )